The (K)inside Story

AUGUST 2023

View this Newsletter as a Webpage

This month’s newsletter contains information about upcoming Network events, a list of resources added in the last month, and additional updates and reminders from the Network, as well as updates from our management committee.

Mark Your Calendars!

We will be hosting an in-person management and steering committee meeting on Wednesday, September 27 in our Washington, DC office. During the 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. session, all of us will meet together – Network staff, SMEs, and partners – and we will have a group lunch. After lunch, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., we will reconvene with only the managing partners. Anyone who cannot attend in person can join us via Zoom, but we welcome the opportunity to see you in person and hope that you’ll be able to join us! If you do not have the calendar invitation, please reach out to Roh at rghafoori@gu.org.

“Improving Your Results in Kin-Finding and Placement”

2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET

Network SME Marina Nitze will debut the Kin-Finding Toolkit, featuring promising practices that have been helping child welfare agencies across the country to increase their kin placement rates. Every highlighted practice will be accompanied by the real-world tools necessary to its implementation, such as sample policy language and forms.

To receive language and/or graphics to help with promotion, please reach out to Maari at mweiss@gu.org.

Thank you to Dr. Joseph Crumbley, Gail Engel, Meredith Hanley, Leland Kiang, Kathy Kinsner, Tara Reynon, Berenice Rushovich, Robyn Shemwell, Sarah Smalls, and Dr. Tyreasa Washington for attending and presenting at the Generations United conference last week. We enjoyed the opportunity to see/meet you in person and the chance to learn with and from you. Your participation helped to make the conference a success!

During the three-year term of the new class of Advisory Council members, Ana will serve alongside an older adult raising a relative child, a grandparent raising multiple grandchildren, an adult who was raised by a grandmother, a person impacted by the opioid epidemic, and other experts from an array of disciplines. For more information, visit https://acl.gov/SGRG.

Please share these resources widely! If you’d like language or graphics, please reach out to Maari at mweiss@gu.org.

Black Kinship Families and the High Cost of Loving – a video resource and accompanying key takeaways document, transcript, and audio-only file, all produced by Deborah Mathis at the National Caucus and Center on Black Aging (NCBA) and featuring NCBA President and CEO Karyne Jones interviewing three kin who are raising grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and/or great-grandchildren.

School Breakfast and Lunch Programs for Grandfamilies and Kinship Families – a resource created by our subject matter experts at the Food Research & Action Center

Finding Program Funding – a Network monthly two-pager, created under the leadership of ZERO TO THREE's Kathy Kinsner and Rebecca Parlakian

Evaluation Resources for Kinship Programs – a resource list, including sample data sharing agreements, compiled by Network Subject Matter Expert Dr. Angelique Day and Berenice Rushovich, of Child Trends, to accompany the webinar “Building Evidence of Success for Kinship Programs: Tips and Strategies”

Ana, Kylee, and USAging's Leland Kiang had an amazing site visit in Utah in July. Approximately 17 program partners took time out of their days to travel and share, and the caregivers who were interviewed also had many wonderful things to say about the program.

The plan is to complete all site visits this year and to begin to share exemplary program practices that can be replicated. 

Year 3 of our cooperative agreement is already upon us! We are setting up meetings with partners to discuss the upcoming third year of our work together, and we will then meet with subject matter experts. We expect to complete contracts with partners and subject matter experts by the end of September so that everything will be in place when the fiscal year begins on September 30. 

If you see anything from the Network or about the Network shared in an outside source, such as a newsletter or website, please let us know by emailing Maari at mweiss@gu.org.

As always, we need your help to accurately track our outreach efforts and our reach. Please fill in our tracking document when you and/or your organization share information about the Network, whether through a presentation, newsletter blurb, social media post, or any other platform. There is also a tab for one-on-one connections relevant to our work together. Thanks in advance for your participation!

On Wednesday, September 13, Shalah will present “Practices and Resources for Serving Kinship Families” at the Pennsylvania Family Support Alliance’s Child Abuse Prevention Symposium.

On Tuesday, September 19, Ana will be on the Kinship Standards Panel at the 2023 NARA Annual Licensing Seminar. NARA is the National Association for Regulatory Administration, a membership organization of foster care and other licensors.

Leland Kiang and Ana presented the first-ever pre-conference intensive on kinship families at the USAging Conference and Tradeshow in Salt Lake City! The friendly face at our table is Kylee, who was attending her first conference as a member of the Network team.

In July, more than 270 individuals registered for the Network’s "Building Evidence of Success for Kinship Programs: Tips and Strategies" webinar, representing systems such as aging, child welfare, courts/legal, disability, education, housing, kinship navigation, TANF, and more. 

Network staff are currently working on individual technical assistance requests on topics including the development of program services, cross-system collaboration, outreach and engagement of kin caregivers, kinship data collection, and evaluation.

Child Trends participated in the July webinar on evaluation, and it was a successful event, drawing many participants from a diverse range of fields (as noted above). They are also continuing to look at data sources pertaining to grandfamilies for updates and trends.

As noted in the new resources section above, the National Caucus and Center on Black Aging (NCBA) has completed the third video in their "Black Kinship Families" series. NCBA is also working with the Diverse Elders Coalition on policy priorities for the coming year, and Karyne Jones proposed that kinship/grandfamilies be included. Other members of the coalition seem receptive. Additionally, NCBA is creating a set of videos on kinship/grandfamilies for the Diverse Elders Coalition, as part of an effort to raise awareness about the families among the members of the coalition. Generations United staff (including Network staff) will participate in the videos.

The National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA) is exploring the opportunity for Dr. Terry Cross to speak at a tribal TANF conference in Oklahoma this month. The next GrandFacts fact sheet is for Choctaw Nation, and it has been approved by the Tribe and reviewed internally by NICWA. Network staff will review and post it online shortly. NICWA staff appreciated Ana’s review of the policy toolkit and they have found that tribes are eager for this document. They have sent an updated version of the document to the Network for review. Lastly, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is hosting a conference, and NICWA is in conversation about it.

Leland Kiang and Ana had to turn people away from USAging’s first-ever pre-conference on kinship/ grandfamilies, which was sold out. We are considering following in the footsteps of SAGE’s review of the LGBTQ components of state action plans for aging, doing something similar for the kinship/grandfamilies components. USAging is also working with Shalah on a series of webinars to help a Wisconsin Area Agency on Aging (AAA) gain more knowledge about kinship families, services offered to the families through children and family services (CFS), and how the AAA and CFS agencies can collaborate to better support kinship families. Additionally, USAging shared information on learning collaboratives with Shalah and information on funding with another partner. Lastly, the learning short featuring an Area Agency on Aging and its services for kinship/grandfamilies, which is USAging’s last deliverable for this fiscal year, is close to completion.

ZERO TO THREE has a new promotion plan for Network content. Every time an external newsletter comes out, Kathy Kinsner and/or Rebecca Parlakian will send promotional language on Network resources/events to the ZERO TO THREE communications team. Additionally, the professional development project for people who work with kinship/grandfamilies is moving along well. The video on legal issues is completed, the video on education is in edits, and the video on finances has been scripted and will be recorded soon. Once the videos are done, they will work on the materials for the 90-minute training that wraps around the three videos. They are very grateful to the GRAND Voices they’ve been able to feature in the videos.

Gail Engel recently presented to the child welfare systems evaluation committee in Colorado and sat in on other testimony. The kinship navigator in Colorado that is run out of Catholic Charities and has nine support groups wasn’t aware of the Network, so she sat down with them to tell them about us.

Sarah Smalls is still working with the Virginia Department of Social Services to try to get a kinship taskforce, and four navigators recently joined the group. They think they’ll have the taskforce by the end of the year. Formed Families Forward, the organization for which Sarah works, is trying to get a kinship navigator position in the Fairfax County Department of Social Services. Lastly, Sarah has had requests from two reporters – one from the Washington Post and one from a smaller local news organization – and she plans to work with Generations United and the Network to move forward with those inquiries.

The Grandfamilies & Kinship Support Network is the first-ever national technical assistance center for those who serve grandfamilies and kinship families. It was created to help guide lasting, systemic reforms. The Network is a new way to collaborate, to work across jurisdictional and systemic boundaries, to eliminate silos, and to help one another and be helped in return. Thank you for being part of it.



The Network is a project of Generations United.

The Network is supported by the Administration for Community Living (ACL), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $9,950,000 with 95 percentage funded by ACL/HHS and $523,684 and 5 percentage funded by non-government sources. The contents are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by ACL/HHS, or the U.S. Government.